Complex Sites

Get Your Weekly Digest

Search

COMPLEX participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means COMPLEX gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.

Hugh Jackman Took a Pay Cut to Make Sure His Final Wolverine Movie Got an R Rating

Trace William Cowen is a writer based in Los Angeles. He tweets with dramatic irregularity here.

Dec 12, 2016

Image via @HughJackman

Now here's a generous gesture that could surely teach us all a big lesson. Want your movie to be violent, filthy, and generally awesome? You're gonna need at least an R rating, something we're thankfully getting with next year's Logan. To make sure that his final Wolverine film secured that (presumably hard) R, Hugh Jackman did the unthinkable: Dude took a pay cut.

Ain't It Cool News' Eric Vespe tweeted updates from this weekend's Butt-Numb-A-Thon film marathon, which gifted attendees with 40 minutes of Logan months ahead of its release:

40 mins of Logan screened with @mang0ld in the house. Full on berserker Wolverine (finally) and more f-bombs than Lebowski.

Director James Mangold, who was in attendance for the Logan tease, revealed that Jackman agreed to make less guap for the movie to make sure those aforementioned "fucks" and other R-rated stuff were allowed:

Mangold said that Hugh Jackman took a salary cut because he wanted to do an R-rated movie.

Let's raise a glass blunt to Jackman for that one, as agreeing to take a cut in his pay probably eased any (annoying) studio fears about an R-rated X-Men movie somehow not totally dominating the box office. Speaking withEmpire back in October, Mangold explained his decision to hit us with Johnny Cash's Nine Inch Nails cover "Hurt" in the film's first trailer:

POST CONTINUES BELOW

"Obviously I have a connection and a fondness for Johnny Cash, and his tone and his message and his music," Mangold said. "But the real driver in all these decisions is trying to separate ourselves, in an accurate way, from the other superhero movies. We think we're going to deliver something a little different and we want to make sure we're selling audiences on the difference."